After the first dialogue draft, all of us felt that the last bit of the play kind of rushed to a finish, also because as a writer I just wanted to get out a draft and get some outside perspective before I finished it. Other than the rush, some of the cast had thoughts of how to add ‘meat’. I tried that road.

Before writing the next draft, I did a scratch reading of the play, where I improvised some scenes. In one voice, the entire story and staging was explained in a way the Mobile Girls could get a rough idea of what the play might be like.

Using this and the podcasts the cast could begin getting an idea of the sonic world of the play. Speaking it out also helped me step aside from meat, and find the story(ies); the blue thread.

Based on this, I started writing the second dialogue draft, where I kind of cracked the last two scenes of how the girls build the dream of this mobile tea shop and bring it back to the crux of the play play.

Most of this writing happened in the middle of the night once everyone has gone asleep, with a cigarette hanging from my mouth, dressed in plain old night clothes.

The personal stories of the girls found a way into the script, the colour blue became a guiding colour to the politics and the larger idea of moving beyond anonymity became a note to end on. There is still more to happen beyond this draft. I want to bring in two more stories within this and a possible rhythm piece on the history of labour politics. Sometimes things might not happen in the first show or there may be additions and tweaks until a few minutes before the show.

Based on how they understood the characters, the cast chose the following colour nighties as their costume –

Nimmy/Abhinaya chose black
Aparnaa/Kalpana chose blue
Selvi/Lakshmi chose yellow
Atchaya/Satya chose red

Here as I am writing, I suddenly remember the story of how a village in Andhra Pradesh banned women from wearing nighties from 7am to 7pm because the husbands found it uncomfortable that their wives where stepping out in the public to buy groceries in their nighties. The women who violated the ban were asked to pay a fine of Rs. 2000!!! Of course, the men were walking around in their lungis and that shouldn’t matter right?

As our Mobile Girls in the play dream –

“In our tea-shop, the women would feel safe to come and loiter even in their nighties, without shawls.”